9 ms·

Firebase Studio

296 points by sumitkumar 1y ago

kylecazar 1y ago
There are so many Google products that overlap it's mind boggling
- echelon 1y ago
  They're trying to get in on the AI IDE / AI coding land rush so they don't have to acquire one of the leaders later. Or get blocked from acquiring one for antitrust reasons. Winning a chunk of this space feels like a major chess move that enables a lot of market optionality. Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations). It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers. I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game? And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal. This is going to be quite the battle.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Google also has quite the graveyard of products. I dont trust them. Hell they even have an OS that competes directly with Android.
  - x187463 1y ago
    Do you think Cursor's AI tools are significantly better than VSCode's Copilot? I haven't had time to check out Cursor. But from the general description, the AI tooling sounds very similar.
    - gusmally 1y ago
      It is a common opinion (shared by myself and many others, including the streamer Primeagen, for example) that Cursor is much better than Copilot
- irjustin 1y ago
  It's also literally named a product that has historical meaning in the developer community.
  - neom 1y ago
    You mean Tamplin didn't ship this?! Srsly tho, I think the idea (or at least was my impression) that it's backed by firebase and firebase has just become ubiquitous for a part of the gcp backend stack? so I thought firebase studio was a way to put a v0 app creator tool on top of firebase? In that context it made sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  And which one this overlaps?
  - kylecazar 1y ago
    To be honest, I don't know what this overlaps with before investing the time using it. As far as I know they already have Google AI Studio, Vertex AI Studio, Project IDX (which I suppose this replaces), Firebase Studio and each individual tool also has their own AI features/plugins (Android Studio w/ Gemini, etc)
    - TiredOfLife 1y ago
      This is renamed Project IDX. And that is something like GitHub Codespaces. Only instead of VS Code it uses a laundered version of VS Code called theia running in browser or Android studio remote video streamed as frontend and backed by a nix configured docker container.
sumitkumar 1y ago
Firebase Studio is an agentic, cloud-based development environment that gives you powerful tools and AI agents directly in your browser. With Firebase Studio, you can prototype, build, test, publish, and iterate on full-stack AI apps from a single place.
- bdcravens 1y ago
  I admit, this comment did a lot better at Buzzword Bingo compared to my attempt in ChatGPT: ("Give me a two sentence marketing pitch for Firebase Studio") "Firebase Studio is a powerful visual development platform that lets you build, customize, and deploy full-featured apps with the speed of low-code and the flexibility of Firebase. Whether you're prototyping or scaling to millions of users, Firebase Studio streamlines your workflow with real-time data, seamless backend integration, and built-in hosting."
  - Zee2 1y ago
    Oof, “low-code”. That’s some pre-2025 buzzword lingo, clearly the model training corpus is out of date!
sam1234apter 1y ago
Google just launched their vibe-coding product Firebase competes directly with Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf etc
indigodaddy 1y ago
this isn't new.. (edit, well actually they've added the "prompt from scratch" thingy like v0.dev/replit/lovable that idx.dev didn't have before) wasn't really gaining the traction they wanted so decided to rebrand. not a bad idea. I use idx.dev (now firebase.studio) and like it. They may not have a "template" for the exact stack/app type you are working with, but it's pretty easy to just setup a blank workspace and modify the nix.dev file as needed..
- g42gregory 1y ago
  How was your experience? Would it compare to Cursor, Windsurf, Cline/Roo?
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    tbh i haven't used the agentic/gemini integration hardly at all yet. All i did was add an already completed project just to see how the web ide/preview performed.
  - CharlieDigital 1y ago
    Friend is working on a SaaS startup solo as a non-technical founder. Been building using Replit and Cursor with Claude 3.5 and 3.7 and launched with live customers. I preface because he's been using AI basically every day to build his SaaS. His comments today: > also gemini 2.5 is beating claude
    - indigodaddy 1y ago
      Mind revealing the product/site or are they going to do an upcoming hn launch..?
      - CharlieDigital 1y ago
        He has asked to not reveal it and not likely to reveal it. I asked him about it because I think the press would be insane, but it's a niche B2B SaaS and he doesn't want the "made with AI" branding to hurt the image of the product from a customer perspective. Second concern is people trying to hack it in case the LLM took shortcuts on security. But I can say that as a 20yr+ eng. and having worked with him on a prior startup, I'm super, super impressed how far he got by himself in under 4 months. Basically a full-blown industry specific CRM with Stripe integration, OCR from mobile web app, desktop web app, marketplace. He himself is concerned that it's the end of SaaS as he thinks anyone can build these things now, but I think there's still a bit of a chasm when it comes to some ancillary pieces like databases.
efxzsh 1y ago
It's a rebranding of https://idx.google.com/ https://idx.google.com/
- sadeshmukh 1y ago
  I was under the impression that idx was formerly just the editor, but I guess that's changed.
m3kw9 1y ago
I’m afraid it will use my google cloud billing and start charging. My prompt “replicate Salesforce”
- the_king 1y ago
  you've got nothing to worry about here. if firebase studio can make a todo app, i'd be surprised. this is the worst "vibe coding" tool i've ever used.
  - fooker 1y ago
    > i've ever used There are tools people complain about and there are tools nobody uses.
- sumitkumar 1y ago
  It is free. though it takes your data for future training. https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=Use%20of%20Gemini%20in%20Firebase,responses%20to%20train%20its%20model. https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=...
the_king 1y ago
I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new. Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4. Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
Here's my short review after playing around with Firebase Studio for ~30 minutes. First of all, I had to turn off Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection because otherwise projects wouldn't load. I gave it the following initial prompt: > An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text. It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated. Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important. Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11. [0] https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png
- windowshopping 1y ago
  I built a complete working application (errortexts.com) using an AI tool, so I have a little insight on this. At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing. So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did. I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit. It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer. But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No. But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.
bpiroman 1y ago
next level vendor lock in
atomicnature 1y ago
It's amazing. I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while. Was procrastinating. Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins. Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason): https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaixtmokrzxhwsfc.cloudworkstations.dev https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix... No frustration whatsoever Their prototyper is awesome And code mode also great I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.
neural_thing 1y ago
So much worse than Devin/Replit. Also, the system prompt encourages it to use Genkit, so it tried to add AI to an email sending function...
- beezlewax 1y ago
  Have you seen gmail recently? They've plugged in ai all over it
lenerdenator 1y ago
As a person currently working on a project that uses Firestore (the db component of Firebase), there is one thing - and only one thing - I want. A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them. That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.
- ohadron 1y ago
  That’s actually a good prompt
  - bsimpson 1y ago
    "Now that you've been promoted, you don't build CRUD tools anymore. Those are below your level. Instead, you build AI agents that build the CRUD tools."
- kfarr 1y ago
  I’ve enjoyed firefoo for this
- hndamien 1y ago
  Have you tried Rowy.io?
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    I've generally looked around. Looking at that, I'm not sure corporate would be down for something like that as a solution for "select multiple documents in a database GUI and operate upon them". Could be wrong though.
- jarek-foksa 1y ago
  For me the biggest missing block is the text search API. It's ridiculous that you can't add a basic search input to your Firebase-based website unless you use TypeSense, Algolia or some other additional database that you have to manage and keep in sync. Despite all the recent enshitification, I can't think of any alternative solution that would come even close to what Firebase has to offer. Authentication API is especially hard to beat (cheap and very easy to integrate).
simonw 1y ago
I tried this on Mobile Safari and it clearly wasn't designed with mobile in mind, then when it got to the preview your app screen the preview panel was blank (it worked when I switched to Firefox on macOS). I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing!
- jerpint 1y ago
  > I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing Curious what kind of phone apps you’ve been using to do vibe coding, I suppose it auto deploys stuff also?
  - simonw 1y ago
    Exclusively HTML+JavaScript web apps. Many of the tools listed on https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon were built on my phone - usually directly in the Claude app, then I copy and paste the resulting HTML into the GitHub web editor on https://github.com/simonw/tools/new/main https://github.com/simonw/tools/new/main to create the page. That repo automatically deploys to my https://tools.simonwillison.net/ https://tools.simonwillison.net/ site.
    - Shalomboy 1y ago
      Your output is prodigious! Absolutely blown away by how much you've been able to write over the years
chaosprint 1y ago
The final result is very poor. Google looks like Hooli with chaotic management. The design has lost its aesthetics, and the gradient color is very ugly. However, the aistudio updated today is good. So it seems that the output is so different because the person in charge is different? From this perspective, there is no hope for Firebase, because the person in charge has poor management logic. even with the best resources in the world, it doesn't help
aitchnyu 1y ago
About the editor, do they allow Flutter development in a Monaco stack? Last time I checked, it was tied to their Intellij-based IDE which needs regular force updates. About the executables, are backend apps running on a temporary VM which can run Postgres etc? Does the Android emulator launch from web?
- munificent 1y ago
  I don't know what Monaco is, but most Flutter developers these days are using VS Code as far as I know.
piokoch 1y ago
Currently I would not invest in any solution that enforces usage of a single LLM model provider, as the scene is really dynamic with the best player changing every month. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really great, but Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and others are probably working on the next, better model. So, Aider + whatever seems to be working best, seems to be the best strategy that works for me. Aider has this nice feature that I can specify what files are added to the context, so I pay less and I do not confuse AI with stuff unrelated to a given task.
t-writescode 1y ago
First off, this looks really cool and I'm excited to see more things like this. The overall chat in the HN conversation has got me thinking, though. Around 7 years ago in my career, one of my most common actions for one-off scripts was for me to create a WinForms application with, often, a couple text boxes and a "Run" button of some sort. The text boxes would be the inputs and the run button would ... run. There was also often like a text output or bunch of loglines or something. I wrote almost exclusively in C# at the time, so it was a way to shove a bunch of C# code into place and test it. I did this for random and arbitrary things I needed to process or solve, a lot like how I used Python or Ruby in the future. I bet it's actually pretty common for people to need "a script that does a thing", and I think, maybe, that's where a lot of the AI scripting of the most immediate use is going to be. If it can be a familiar interface for people to build (in the past, the IDE) and a familiar or simple place to interact with the generated script (the WinForms + buttons), these programs to generate scripts and do "stuff" could likely spread pretty wide. I think Jupyter Notebooks are another example of this, another precursor, of sorts?
- piva00 1y ago
  That's one use case where LLMs really help me, one-off scripts where I know exactly what I need done, know it's possible but would take me much longer to brush off my Bash, Python, etc. skills to write it. Give the LLM a prompt, let it write the scaffolding, do the tweaks I need, and iterate over with the LLM if I forgot how exactly it was to write a for-loop in Bash.
rambojohnson 1y ago
Using AI to build AI to help AI build more AI with AI
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dankobgd 1y ago
Stopped reading after ai
hnlurker22 1y ago
Software engineers, who are the most skilled in terms of holding ai's hand to create a product, should be cloning every single saas out there and making money by eating a share of the market. AI is a great way for engineers to become founders. Let's bring the competition.
- siva7 1y ago
  Let's go brrrr! I always wondered how the end of yc would look like.
  - hnlurker22 1y ago
    YC is money laundering at this point. "Unicorns" and "disrupting" are just other names for money laundering and illegal activity.
- CharlieDigital 1y ago
  5 years working at startups has taught me that go-to-market is almost always the most important function. There are very few truly novel spaces and apps. You can clone whatever you want, but you'll get nowhere without a solid GTM.
  - hnlurker22 1y ago
    That applies to new products not clones. AI can also help with that thanks.
    - CharlieDigital 1y ago
      This especially applies to clones. How do you stand out and find the right customer niche?
      - hnlurker22 1y ago
        Eating the big fish is one great book about competing with a market leader. You're talking like go to market is rocket science. Anyone can read a book and follow the steps. Many don't.
amelius 1y ago
Can't we just have an AI that runs like a window manager? I.e. it has access to all apps on my desktop. And it can help me coding, but it can also help me write documents, draw stuff, edit photos and videos, etc.
- siva7 1y ago
  That's the holy grail, my friend. Whoever succeeds will be the successor of 90s Microsoft (OS) and 00's Google (Internet/Search) in creating a unified platform which your grandmother associates as being "the computer". I fear that all the major players are trying exactly that (which is the reason why no one tries to be just a foundation model supplier). Some have the Hardware (Apple) but lack the software execution, others have the software (OpenAI) but lack the Hardware.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Well, you can start with a plastic cup, gain users and momentum, and work towards that holy grail. Makes sense that everybody wants that ultimate control over the user('s computer).
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
  Apple seems to agree that that would be the ideal UX for AI, but for any computer, (1) it's going to require massive rework at the OS level, and (2) app developers have to be willing to integrate with the OS-level AI. I'm not sure that the latter is happening since profit incentives much better align with walled gardens.
antouank 1y ago
> Out of capacity. Please try again later.
aamederen 1y ago
It makes the most sense (to me) for app platforms like Firebase to invest deeply in the AI application development wave. Creating something from scratch with prompts is impressive but the gap between something that works locally to something that people can use is still large enough to require some dev & ops expertise.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  v0.dev has bridged that gap pretty well. The deploy button usually just works and your app is then live on a vercel.app subdomain.
tymscar 1y ago
The ai part of the app is basically useless. After 2 hours of “vibe coding” a chess clock flutter app I got basically nothing in the end. It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again. Would not recommend anyone to use it. Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!
- vsmenon 1y ago
  [ I work on Dart at Google. ] The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main. We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".
  - tymscar 1y ago
    Hey. That makes more sense. To be honest, I don’t think it should be one of the main things on the front page when creating a new project in that case. However for what it’s worth Ive also asked gemini to translate this simple chess clock app to react because of how buggy the flutter project was and it just got stuck again and again no matter how much I helped it
- jen_h 1y ago
  [Full disclosure, work @ Firebase] But try this: Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt. YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"
  - tymscar 1y ago
romanovcode 1y ago
- Create Angular app (success) - Add SSR (fail) - Give the correct command to add SSR (success) - Add i18n (fail) - Retries like 6 times, completely messes angular.json file up to no recovery, project doesn't even build Outputs: It seems I am running circles, I cannot help you with that. Wow, AI will really replace developers soon. /s
- rockyj 1y ago
  Similar experience, generated code confidently, manually had to copy paste it in places, only to find out not only it is bad but even the code was terribly structured / random gibberish sometimes.
josefrichter 1y ago
This looks very much like Replit. I like Replit, built a bunch of hobby projects mostly for myself, even though some of them are deployed and publicly accessible. You will inevitably run into some doom loops, but we're still at the beginning. These things will probably be super powerful in 2 years time.
oulipo 1y ago
I've been quite unimpressed with Google products for a while
alittletooraph2 1y ago
I know it'll probably get better over time but it's pretty awful compared to what you can do with v0 right now.
kaishiro 1y ago
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt my age more than reading “vibe coding” a half dozen times in this comment section.
sexy_seedbox 1y ago
Asked FBS for a simple web form, it immediately went with NextJS, TailwindCSS and a whole bunch of build tools. Ask it again to change it to vanilla JavaScript, now it's stuck in an infinity loop... bad vibes : (
varispeed 1y ago
Firebase for me is a synonym of running up large unexpected bill. Is that possible? Billings systems seems to be so opaque and complex. and can it learn my private keys and then expose them to someone else?
tamad 1y ago
I’m a teacher, so different than most folks posting here. I have a little coding experience, but it’s definitely not my thing professionally. I just made several utility apps with this that I’ll be using in the classroom.

Firebase Studio

296 points by sumitkumar 1y ago

kylecazar 1y ago

There are so many Google products that overlap it's mind boggling

echelon 1y ago
They're trying to get in on the AI IDE / AI coding land rush so they don't have to acquire one of the leaders later. Or get blocked from acquiring one for antitrust reasons. Winning a chunk of this space feels like a major chess move that enables a lot of market optionality. Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations). It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers. I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game? And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal. This is going to be quite the battle.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Google also has quite the graveyard of products. I dont trust them. Hell they even have an OS that competes directly with Android.
- x187463 1y ago
  Do you think Cursor's AI tools are significantly better than VSCode's Copilot? I haven't had time to check out Cursor. But from the general description, the AI tooling sounds very similar.
  - gusmally 1y ago
    It is a common opinion (shared by myself and many others, including the streamer Primeagen, for example) that Cursor is much better than Copilot
irjustin 1y ago
It's also literally named a product that has historical meaning in the developer community.
- neom 1y ago
  You mean Tamplin didn't ship this?! Srsly tho, I think the idea (or at least was my impression) that it's backed by firebase and firebase has just become ubiquitous for a part of the gcp backend stack? so I thought firebase studio was a way to put a v0 app creator tool on top of firebase? In that context it made sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
And which one this overlaps?
- kylecazar 1y ago
  To be honest, I don't know what this overlaps with before investing the time using it. As far as I know they already have Google AI Studio, Vertex AI Studio, Project IDX (which I suppose this replaces), Firebase Studio and each individual tool also has their own AI features/plugins (Android Studio w/ Gemini, etc)
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    This is renamed Project IDX. And that is something like GitHub Codespaces. Only instead of VS Code it uses a laundered version of VS Code called theia running in browser or Android studio remote video streamed as frontend and backed by a nix configured docker container.

sumitkumar 1y ago

Firebase Studio is an agentic, cloud-based development environment that gives you powerful tools and AI agents directly in your browser. With Firebase Studio, you can prototype, build, test, publish, and iterate on full-stack AI apps from a single place.

bdcravens 1y ago
I admit, this comment did a lot better at Buzzword Bingo compared to my attempt in ChatGPT: ("Give me a two sentence marketing pitch for Firebase Studio") "Firebase Studio is a powerful visual development platform that lets you build, customize, and deploy full-featured apps with the speed of low-code and the flexibility of Firebase. Whether you're prototyping or scaling to millions of users, Firebase Studio streamlines your workflow with real-time data, seamless backend integration, and built-in hosting."
- Zee2 1y ago
  Oof, “low-code”. That’s some pre-2025 buzzword lingo, clearly the model training corpus is out of date!

sam1234apter 1y ago

Google just launched their vibe-coding product Firebase competes directly with Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf etc

indigodaddy 1y ago

this isn't new.. (edit, well actually they've added the "prompt from scratch" thingy like v0.dev/replit/lovable that idx.dev didn't have before) wasn't really gaining the traction they wanted so decided to rebrand. not a bad idea. I use idx.dev (now firebase.studio) and like it. They may not have a "template" for the exact stack/app type you are working with, but it's pretty easy to just setup a blank workspace and modify the nix.dev file as needed..

g42gregory 1y ago
How was your experience? Would it compare to Cursor, Windsurf, Cline/Roo?
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  tbh i haven't used the agentic/gemini integration hardly at all yet. All i did was add an already completed project just to see how the web ide/preview performed.
- CharlieDigital 1y ago
  Friend is working on a SaaS startup solo as a non-technical founder. Been building using Replit and Cursor with Claude 3.5 and 3.7 and launched with live customers. I preface because he's been using AI basically every day to build his SaaS. His comments today: > also gemini 2.5 is beating claude
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Mind revealing the product/site or are they going to do an upcoming hn launch..?
    - CharlieDigital 1y ago
      He has asked to not reveal it and not likely to reveal it. I asked him about it because I think the press would be insane, but it's a niche B2B SaaS and he doesn't want the "made with AI" branding to hurt the image of the product from a customer perspective. Second concern is people trying to hack it in case the LLM took shortcuts on security. But I can say that as a 20yr+ eng. and having worked with him on a prior startup, I'm super, super impressed how far he got by himself in under 4 months. Basically a full-blown industry specific CRM with Stripe integration, OCR from mobile web app, desktop web app, marketplace. He himself is concerned that it's the end of SaaS as he thinks anyone can build these things now, but I think there's still a bit of a chasm when it comes to some ancillary pieces like databases.

efxzsh 1y ago

It's a rebranding of https://idx.google.com/ https://idx.google.com/

sadeshmukh 1y ago
I was under the impression that idx was formerly just the editor, but I guess that's changed.

m3kw9 1y ago

I’m afraid it will use my google cloud billing and start charging. My prompt “replicate Salesforce”

the_king 1y ago
you've got nothing to worry about here. if firebase studio can make a todo app, i'd be surprised. this is the worst "vibe coding" tool i've ever used.
- fooker 1y ago
  > i've ever used There are tools people complain about and there are tools nobody uses.
sumitkumar 1y ago
It is free. though it takes your data for future training. https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=Use%20of%20Gemini%20in%20Firebase,responses%20to%20train%20its%20model. https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=...

the_king 1y ago

I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new. Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4. Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

Here's my short review after playing around with Firebase Studio for ~30 minutes. First of all, I had to turn off Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection because otherwise projects wouldn't load. I gave it the following initial prompt: > An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text. It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated. Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important. Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11. [0] https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png

windowshopping 1y ago
I built a complete working application (errortexts.com) using an AI tool, so I have a little insight on this. At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing. So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did. I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit. It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer. But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No. But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.

bpiroman 1y ago

next level vendor lock in

atomicnature 1y ago

It's amazing. I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while. Was procrastinating. Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins. Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason): https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaixtmokrzxhwsfc.cloudworkstations.dev https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix... No frustration whatsoever Their prototyper is awesome And code mode also great I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.

neural_thing 1y ago

So much worse than Devin/Replit. Also, the system prompt encourages it to use Genkit, so it tried to add AI to an email sending function...

beezlewax 1y ago
Have you seen gmail recently? They've plugged in ai all over it

lenerdenator 1y ago

As a person currently working on a project that uses Firestore (the db component of Firebase), there is one thing - and only one thing - I want. A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them. That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.

ohadron 1y ago
That’s actually a good prompt
- bsimpson 1y ago
  "Now that you've been promoted, you don't build CRUD tools anymore. Those are below your level. Instead, you build AI agents that build the CRUD tools."
kfarr 1y ago
I’ve enjoyed firefoo for this
hndamien 1y ago
Have you tried Rowy.io?
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  I've generally looked around. Looking at that, I'm not sure corporate would be down for something like that as a solution for "select multiple documents in a database GUI and operate upon them". Could be wrong though.
jarek-foksa 1y ago
For me the biggest missing block is the text search API. It's ridiculous that you can't add a basic search input to your Firebase-based website unless you use TypeSense, Algolia or some other additional database that you have to manage and keep in sync. Despite all the recent enshitification, I can't think of any alternative solution that would come even close to what Firebase has to offer. Authentication API is especially hard to beat (cheap and very easy to integrate).

simonw 1y ago

I tried this on Mobile Safari and it clearly wasn't designed with mobile in mind, then when it got to the preview your app screen the preview panel was blank (it worked when I switched to Firefox on macOS). I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing!

jerpint 1y ago
> I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing Curious what kind of phone apps you’ve been using to do vibe coding, I suppose it auto deploys stuff also?
- simonw 1y ago
  Exclusively HTML+JavaScript web apps. Many of the tools listed on https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon were built on my phone - usually directly in the Claude app, then I copy and paste the resulting HTML into the GitHub web editor on https://github.com/simonw/tools/new/main https://github.com/simonw/tools/new/main to create the page. That repo automatically deploys to my https://tools.simonwillison.net/ https://tools.simonwillison.net/ site.
  - Shalomboy 1y ago
    Your output is prodigious! Absolutely blown away by how much you've been able to write over the years

chaosprint 1y ago

The final result is very poor. Google looks like Hooli with chaotic management. The design has lost its aesthetics, and the gradient color is very ugly. However, the aistudio updated today is good. So it seems that the output is so different because the person in charge is different? From this perspective, there is no hope for Firebase, because the person in charge has poor management logic. even with the best resources in the world, it doesn't help

aitchnyu 1y ago

About the editor, do they allow Flutter development in a Monaco stack? Last time I checked, it was tied to their Intellij-based IDE which needs regular force updates. About the executables, are backend apps running on a temporary VM which can run Postgres etc? Does the Android emulator launch from web?

munificent 1y ago
I don't know what Monaco is, but most Flutter developers these days are using VS Code as far as I know.

piokoch 1y ago

Currently I would not invest in any solution that enforces usage of a single LLM model provider, as the scene is really dynamic with the best player changing every month. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really great, but Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and others are probably working on the next, better model. So, Aider + whatever seems to be working best, seems to be the best strategy that works for me. Aider has this nice feature that I can specify what files are added to the context, so I pay less and I do not confuse AI with stuff unrelated to a given task.

t-writescode 1y ago

First off, this looks really cool and I'm excited to see more things like this. The overall chat in the HN conversation has got me thinking, though. Around 7 years ago in my career, one of my most common actions for one-off scripts was for me to create a WinForms application with, often, a couple text boxes and a "Run" button of some sort. The text boxes would be the inputs and the run button would ... run. There was also often like a text output or bunch of loglines or something. I wrote almost exclusively in C# at the time, so it was a way to shove a bunch of C# code into place and test it. I did this for random and arbitrary things I needed to process or solve, a lot like how I used Python or Ruby in the future. I bet it's actually pretty common for people to need "a script that does a thing", and I think, maybe, that's where a lot of the AI scripting of the most immediate use is going to be. If it can be a familiar interface for people to build (in the past, the IDE) and a familiar or simple place to interact with the generated script (the WinForms + buttons), these programs to generate scripts and do "stuff" could likely spread pretty wide. I think Jupyter Notebooks are another example of this, another precursor, of sorts?

piva00 1y ago
That's one use case where LLMs really help me, one-off scripts where I know exactly what I need done, know it's possible but would take me much longer to brush off my Bash, Python, etc. skills to write it. Give the LLM a prompt, let it write the scaffolding, do the tweaks I need, and iterate over with the LLM if I forgot how exactly it was to write a for-loop in Bash.

rambojohnson 1y ago

Using AI to build AI to help AI build more AI with AI

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dankobgd 1y ago

Stopped reading after ai

hnlurker22 1y ago

Software engineers, who are the most skilled in terms of holding ai's hand to create a product, should be cloning every single saas out there and making money by eating a share of the market. AI is a great way for engineers to become founders. Let's bring the competition.

siva7 1y ago
Let's go brrrr! I always wondered how the end of yc would look like.
- hnlurker22 1y ago
  YC is money laundering at this point. "Unicorns" and "disrupting" are just other names for money laundering and illegal activity.
CharlieDigital 1y ago
5 years working at startups has taught me that go-to-market is almost always the most important function. There are very few truly novel spaces and apps. You can clone whatever you want, but you'll get nowhere without a solid GTM.
- hnlurker22 1y ago
  That applies to new products not clones. AI can also help with that thanks.
  - CharlieDigital 1y ago
    This especially applies to clones. How do you stand out and find the right customer niche?
    - hnlurker22 1y ago
      Eating the big fish is one great book about competing with a market leader. You're talking like go to market is rocket science. Anyone can read a book and follow the steps. Many don't.

amelius 1y ago

Can't we just have an AI that runs like a window manager? I.e. it has access to all apps on my desktop. And it can help me coding, but it can also help me write documents, draw stuff, edit photos and videos, etc.

siva7 1y ago
That's the holy grail, my friend. Whoever succeeds will be the successor of 90s Microsoft (OS) and 00's Google (Internet/Search) in creating a unified platform which your grandmother associates as being "the computer". I fear that all the major players are trying exactly that (which is the reason why no one tries to be just a foundation model supplier). Some have the Hardware (Apple) but lack the software execution, others have the software (OpenAI) but lack the Hardware.
- amelius 1y ago
  Well, you can start with a plastic cup, gain users and momentum, and work towards that holy grail. Makes sense that everybody wants that ultimate control over the user('s computer).
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
Apple seems to agree that that would be the ideal UX for AI, but for any computer, (1) it's going to require massive rework at the OS level, and (2) app developers have to be willing to integrate with the OS-level AI. I'm not sure that the latter is happening since profit incentives much better align with walled gardens.

antouank 1y ago

> Out of capacity. Please try again later.

aamederen 1y ago

It makes the most sense (to me) for app platforms like Firebase to invest deeply in the AI application development wave. Creating something from scratch with prompts is impressive but the gap between something that works locally to something that people can use is still large enough to require some dev & ops expertise.

indigodaddy 1y ago
v0.dev has bridged that gap pretty well. The deploy button usually just works and your app is then live on a vercel.app subdomain.

tymscar 1y ago

The ai part of the app is basically useless. After 2 hours of “vibe coding” a chess clock flutter app I got basically nothing in the end. It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again. Would not recommend anyone to use it. Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!

vsmenon 1y ago
[ I work on Dart at Google. ] The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main. We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".
- tymscar 1y ago
  Hey. That makes more sense. To be honest, I don’t think it should be one of the main things on the front page when creating a new project in that case. However for what it’s worth Ive also asked gemini to translate this simple chess clock app to react because of how buggy the flutter project was and it just got stuck again and again no matter how much I helped it
jen_h 1y ago
[Full disclosure, work @ Firebase] But try this: Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt. YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"
- tymscar 1y ago

romanovcode 1y ago

- Create Angular app (success) - Add SSR (fail) - Give the correct command to add SSR (success) - Add i18n (fail) - Retries like 6 times, completely messes angular.json file up to no recovery, project doesn't even build Outputs: It seems I am running circles, I cannot help you with that. Wow, AI will really replace developers soon. /s

rockyj 1y ago
Similar experience, generated code confidently, manually had to copy paste it in places, only to find out not only it is bad but even the code was terribly structured / random gibberish sometimes.

josefrichter 1y ago

This looks very much like Replit. I like Replit, built a bunch of hobby projects mostly for myself, even though some of them are deployed and publicly accessible. You will inevitably run into some doom loops, but we're still at the beginning. These things will probably be super powerful in 2 years time.

oulipo 1y ago

I've been quite unimpressed with Google products for a while

alittletooraph2 1y ago

I know it'll probably get better over time but it's pretty awful compared to what you can do with v0 right now.

kaishiro 1y ago

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt my age more than reading “vibe coding” a half dozen times in this comment section.

sexy_seedbox 1y ago

Asked FBS for a simple web form, it immediately went with NextJS, TailwindCSS and a whole bunch of build tools. Ask it again to change it to vanilla JavaScript, now it's stuck in an infinity loop... bad vibes : (

varispeed 1y ago

Firebase for me is a synonym of running up large unexpected bill. Is that possible? Billings systems seems to be so opaque and complex. and can it learn my private keys and then expose them to someone else?

tamad 1y ago

I’m a teacher, so different than most folks posting here. I have a little coding experience, but it’s definitely not my thing professionally. I just made several utility apps with this that I’ll be using in the classroom.